Monday, January 30, 2017

The Obsidian Chamber
by Preston and Child returns Aloysius Pendergast to another exciting and
intriguing case of blood lust, family complications, and unrequited love. Everyone
who is supposed to be dead isn’t. Proctor is sent on a wild goose chase to the
Sahara desert. Mrs. Trask’s sister in Albany suddenly becomes ill. Constance is
abducted by Diogenes, Aloysius’ younger brother. Aloysius finds himself
shackled on a drug runners boat in Maine waters. Total chaos! No one has had
time to recover from the Exmouth experience. This novel pits brother against
brother in a modern classic Cain and Abel melodrama. Many family secrets are
revealed as these two familial foes tussle for the love of Constance Greene,
who isn’t whom we think she is. She, too, has her issues with the brothers,
especially Diogenes who raped her and fathered her son, now in a secret
monastery in India. In addition, she holds the biggest secret and provides the
catalyst for Diogenes’ bad behavior. Add to this mix a very sick female
assassin and well we have another thriller, a spellbinder from our masterful
duo that is difficult to put down.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Good Morning, Midnight
by Lily Brooks-Dalton is a fanciful novel that asks the question, “Is anyone
out there?” For those asking the question we see lonely, isolated people
learning how to interact, to communicate, to love. The answer is a surprise.

One individual, Augustine, is isolated in the North Pole. He
is an astronomer and refuses to leave when his companions evacuate because of
some catastrophe happening in the world. He is a curmudgeon who never had a
successful relationship with anyone, especially women until he met Jean and got
her pregnant in his youth, some thirty plus years ago. He never met his
daughter. When his companions leave, he discovers a young girl, Iris, who is maybe
eight years old in this remote Arctic environment. Where did she come from? Was
she on the transport? Suddenly he has to care for another person. In trying to
communicate with the evacuation plane, no one answers his calls. Later when he
travels to another outpost because of the better communication devices, he
still finds he is unable to raise anyone on the radio. They are alone in this
remote place on Earth, the North Pole.

The other individual, Sully, is on a spacecraft, Aether with five other scientists, who
left Earth, two years ago for Jupiter. After success on a moon of Jupiter,
while on their return trip home communications with Earth are suddenly gone.
Sully is alone in the world after her single mom, Jean, remarries, has twins
when Sully is eleven.So Sully follows
another path, she goes to boarding school, to a college far from her new home,
and then to space. “She had boarded Aether
believing that nothing could be more important than the Jovian probes, and now
– everything was more important. The whole purpose of their mission seemed
insignificant, pointless. Day by day, there was nothing except the digital
binary of mechanical wanderers and the cosmic rays from the stars and their
planets.”

In both stories, of the isolated Arctic scientist and of the
isolated astronaut, communication devices break and have to be repaired as each
tries to find someone to talk to. Augustine was a ham operator in his youth,
“These were his happiest moments as a child. Alone, without the cruelty of the
other kids at school, without the volatility of his mother, without the
belittling comments of his father. Just him, his equipment, and the hum of his
own mind.” He travels from his observatory to a remote station with better ham
operation equipment. Sully has to repair their communication dish that has been
destroyed by space junk. Two people who spent a lifetime avoiding others are
now desperate to find someone with whom to communicate.

As it turns out Augustine and Sully find each other through
the airwaves and have brief conversations. Because of their locations, he in
the Arctic and she in space, the communications link is fragile and brief. They
connect only when the orbits are aligned. The crew believes he may be the last
man on Earth since they can’t establish any other communication with Earth.
When Earth comes in view, they first notice there are no lights indicating
cities. The reason that Augustine and Sully are alone and never connect with
each other is best stated by a fellow crewman of Sully’s, “Not everyone has a
calling.” The implication that we do what we do may be why Augustine never knew
his daughter and Sully never knew her father.

When we look back on our lives we all have regrets, and one
of them is always, we wished we communicated better and spent time with a loved
one.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Once Upon a Time in
Camelot by James Patrick Hunt looks at 1960’s and 70’s and supposes what
might have happened if JFK and RFK weren’t assassinated and Castro didn’t
live.It is 1972 and involves a family
dynasty, the McCormicks, an Irish family, at the highest levels of politics. The old man, Ben, made his money in
bootlegging in Chicago during prohibition, and was ambassador to Germany before
WWII and admired Hitler, much to everyone’s eventual embarrassment. His oldest
son, Michael, died in WWII; the second son, Dan, was wounded and became
president; the third son, Terry, Secretary of Defense, was running for
president, following his brother to the highest office; and the fourth son,
Andy, was a senator slated to be president.

The other side of this novel involves the gangsters that
ruled the economy of the country and served the McCormicks well. There’s a
Hollywood connection as well as an entanglement with young starlets in the
current White House. Castro was dead, but Cuba was still communist. And Vietnam
is the center of controversy in this administration. The gangsters are based in
Chicago and the lead guy is Lewis Knowles who has Vince Kegan as his main hit man.
Knowles had done business with Ben many years ago and never trusted him. Kegan,
a Korean War vet is a simple barber in addition to being the best hit man in
the business. Just as oil and water don’t mix, Knowles and the spawn of
McCormick don’t mix. It becomes a battle royale.

The spark that puts these two factions together are the
theft of a Pentagon Report, by Albert Hirsch, that looks unfavorably on the
McCormick presidency and America’s involvement in Vietnam. The McCormicks, the
leaders and chief law enforcers of the country want Hirsch dead and hire
Knowles to do it. Knowles assigns it to Kegan. Kegan, however has rules, no
civilians and Hirsch is a civilian. Hirsch is not mob. It is ironic that Kegan
the murderer, the hit man, has rules and the law enforcers of the country, the
McCormicks don’t have rules.

Then it goes sideways in a most bizarre twist. This novel is
a fun joy ride back through those innocent and intricate times, a behind the
scene look from a seat at a Drive In movie watching Vietnam and the Watergate
unfold from a different point of view of what if’s. For those of us who lived
through those days, this is a fantastic fun read. Terry may remind you of
someone we know today.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Confidence Game
by Maria Konnikova is so today. The key to the con game is “We’ve done most of
the work for them; we want to believe in what they are telling us.” Politicians
are the supreme con artists. Right now, Donald J Trump is the ultimate con artist.
The name “con man” comes from the “confidence man.” If you had confidence in
someone you gave him your trust, money, or a possession expecting a return,
which rarely happened. Ponzi schemes are classic con games. It is more than
three card monte. An important element of the con game is that you never knew
you were conned, which meant it could happen again and again and again.
Konnikova establishes the criteria for identifying a con man and his traits in
her thesis and then sets out to prove it. According to her the con man is a
psychopath, a narcissist, and Machiavellian. The psychopath has no empathy for
his victims, no guilt, no remorse; thus the con is easy. The must be the center
of activity and dominate the stage. Finally the Machiavellian must be the
ultimate boss, the authoritarian. Konnikova uses these three traits, the dark
triad, to define the con man and then sets out to prove it. I immediately saw
Trump in this set of criteria, especially in his career in NYC as a real estate
tycoon. He says whatever he wants without concern for other people’s feelings
and never apologizes. He lies or simply says whatever he needs to to support
his positions. “No publicity is bad publicity” was always his motto. He scorns
losers and steam rolls over all competition in illegal, immoral, and
heavy-handed ways, as he is the cruel authoritarian. Now he is in the White
House.

The first step to a con, as we all know, is doing your
homework. Before that interview, study up on the company so you can talk about
it with intelligence. Once “you get your foot in the door” chat up your
colleagues and superiors about their family, especially their kids. Remember
names. These are the basic tools we all use in our professional and personal
lives. After all most communications with others is based on what they can do
for us at some point in our lives. We’ve all been told this in career
counseling or from others when they willingly give us advice on advancement. We
use information to ‘manipulate’ others we get from their family members,
friends, colleagues and social media; if not from them directly.We ingratiate ourselves with others by
sharing common ideas, experiences, and stories for our advantage in a future
collaboration or endeavor. “Never burn bridges” is further advice we are given
for the sole purpose of any future need on their part for our advancement. Our false
compliments, phony glad-handing, and social lies begin our conning someone
else. It doesn’t matter our intelligence or our financial level, we are all
conned and we all con; it is just a matter of degree and outcome.

“We believe because we want to.” After “getting the foot in
the door” it becomes about the good story. Facts can be checked or fudged, but
a story; a good story is always the hook. Religions are built on stories, not
philosophies. The more emotional a story is the better the con. Con artists
prey on those who have lost a job, a lover, and a family member. If blame can
be assigned to that loss all the better. Trump found this easy as he preyed on
the disillusioned voter who was looking for a scapegoat, a reason for his
misery and loss. The mark will believe any lie and not verify anything as long
as it soothes their immediate pain, not realizing greater pain is in the
future. Lies, of course, are the foundation for many a con.

As I read this book, I came to realize everything we do is a
con. It is a matter of degree when we consider them to be hurtful or not. It is
all about what’s in it for me, how am I going to get what I want, or how am I
going to gain something?

The stories of the great cons are amazing and one can’t but
appreciate the genius of many of them and yet be disgusted at them in the same
moment. The gullibility of the conned also doesn’t escape us as we think “that
couldn’t happen to me” and yet it probably has and you don’t know it. In
England, the police discovered a list of 1600 people who were conned that was
being passed around different con men. When the police made these 1600 people
aware of the cons, most of the 1600 weren’t even aware they had been conned.

In trying to get a handle on our political events of late,
I’ve come on what may satiate me to the cause: “What seems like sheer stupidity at best, and more likely willful
ignorance, is actually quite understandable in the moment. The power of the
tale isn’t the strength of its logic; it’s that at the point it’s told, we’re
past being reasonable. The superiority bias doesn’t just make us more
vulnerable to tales that seem rather tall to an objective eye. It colors how we
then evaluate evidence and make decisions.” The key point is “willful ignorance.” This is
why we get conned. Rather than fact check, rather than verify, rather than
investigate the American voter simply accepted what they wanted to hear:
“willful ignorance.”

We may think of con artists as shady characters lurking in
back alleys, when in fact they are center stage (the narcissist). Hucksters are
all around us from car salesmen to the evangelist to the teacher. They come in
all degrees and professions. As I read this book I became more conscious of how
much teachers, my profession are con artists. How do we make those kids do our
bidding? “Con artists, at their best and worst, give us meaning. We fall for
them because it would make our lives better if the reality they proposed were
indeed true. They give us a sense of purpose, of value, of direction.” So many
of the researchers cited by Konnikova are the same researchers I read and studied
during my teaching career, the same researchers that are used in educational
arguments and theories.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Bronx Requiem by
John Clarkson is a hard hitting violent story of ex-cons teaming with their
parole officer to clean up a crime infested neighborhood in the Bronx and
beyond. James Beck, is an exonerated cop killer, who gathers together other
reformed cons to work behind the scenes to discover the killer of another
recently released ex-con, Packy Johnson, who had saved Beck’s life in prison.
Packy isn’t out seventeen hours after a seventeen year term when he is killed.
Packy had learned his daughter was whoring and wanted to stop it. This is where
Beck starts his crusade to solve this murder marching through a tangle of
corrupt prison guards and a rising star young cop in the Bronx who figures he
is righteous, when in fact he ain’t. The irony in this action packed novel is
that the cons are doing it legally while the law enforcement officers are not
and they get their comeuppance in very appropriate, creative, and fantastical ways.
Beck is a genius in setting the record straight, bringing justice to the right
people, and providing perfect endings to otherwise potentially sad outcomes. He
does get one thing wrong about Packy’s murder in the ultimate twist to this thoroughly
enjoyable novel. The ultimate lesson to this Bronx tale comes through Packy’s
daughter.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

The Woods by
Harlan Coben is the first book of his I’ve read. The first impression is that
the past always comes back to bite you and the second is that money is the
devil’s tool. All it takes is one sick puppy to hatch a plan of murder to
appease his sick mind and he can quickly infest others, especially if he has
more money than anyone else and he is a bully. His name is Wayne Steubens in
this fiction. “Exactly. One of Sherlock’s axioms goes something like this: ‘It
is a big mistake to theorize before one has data – because one begins to twist
facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’”

Paul Copeland, the son of Russian immigrants, is the Essex,
NJ county prosecutor. He is prosecuting a rape case. The victim is a young
black unwed mother of a fifteen month old.She is an exotic dancer, a stripper and whore. When she is invited to a
frat party a week after she did a show and had some sex with some of the boys.
This time she is raped. She doesn’t deserve that. But the rich white boys in
the frat don’t get it.

The real story is about what happened at a summer camp when
Paul was young, when he lost his virginity and four of his friends. One of the
campers was arrested and in jail for life. The owner of the camp and his
daughter were destroyed. But then one of the murdered kids shows up dead,
twenty years later in Washington Heights. That’s when the roller coaster ride
begins for Paul, as he has to go deep into the woods to discover the truth and
almost die in the process.

It is a story of what we will do for our children. It is
about power misused and about bullies, bullies who prey on the weak until
someone comes along and punches the bully in the nose. “No, we were bullies. We
were not gods – we were the dirty henchmen of the gods. They had the power. We
were scared, so we made everyone a little scared. That made us feel like big
men – terrorizing the weak.”

Monday, January 9, 2017

Poison, A Wicked Snow
White Tale by Sarah Pinborough is another wickedly good tale from a
mistress of wicked tales, which includes her other offerings, Beauty and Charm. Pinborough takes liberties with the classic fairy tale, as
does the huntsman, who kills a white stag, with the wicked queen and Snow
White, before he is turned into a mouse. He becomes a field mouse because he
tries to fool the wicked queen with the heart of a deer instead of the heart of
Snow White, for which he was hired to acquire. The wicked queen’s grandmother,
an old crone, sees the deception, and helps the wicked queen by turning the
huntsman into a field mouse. Once her work is done, the grandmother returns
home to greet a young boy and girl following her breadcrumbs to her hovel.

The dwarves aren’t your father’s dwarves: Dreamy, Grouchy,
Bolshy, Feisty, Stumpy, Breezy, and Belcher. Snow White isn’t the shy
diminutive princess we thought we knew. She dresses like a man rather than like
a princess, rides a horse like a man, and dominates in the bed. The question to
be asked, is the prince the real prince since he doesn’t wake her with a kiss? He
just happens to be at the right place at the right time and does nothing
princely to prove he is the right man. In fact he does everything to show he is
the wrong prince. The prince, finds his experienced new bride too much to
handle, too hot to handle.He finds a
way to dominate her and keep his male pride. There are so many unanswered
questions and this story does not end as most fairy tales do when everyone
lives happily ever after. Be warned as you enter the beautifully twisted and
wicked world of Pinborough as she rewrites and projects another view on love.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

The Comet Seekers
by Helen Sedgwick requires some knowledge of the Bayeux Tapestry.
It chronicles events of 1066 when William the Conqueror invaded England and something
about Halley’s Comet. Two women, Severine and Róisín, dominate the action of this
heady novel. Ghosts haunt the former while the latter is searching the past by
studying comets to better understand the present. The trajectory of comets is
an interesting metaphor of human life, while ghosts are fascinating specters
that also influence humans. In both women’s lives the past is crucial. Both
understand that death precedes life. “But under all that, there is a part of
her that knows we are too small to matter. Nothing happened, that’s the thing.
The universe carried on, the comets kept coming – it made no difference. A life
and a death made no difference. Perhaps that’s why she is frozen.”

Severine is frozen in her home of Bayeux, because that is
where the ghosts are, her family ghosts. Her son, Françoise, has tried to get her out,
but she refuses to leave. Róisín is frozen in her studies as
she chases comets all the way to Antarctica. She is exploring the past to
understand life now and perhaps project into the future. Severine will become a
ghost and follow that unfulfilled life just as Róisín will be like a comet, a frozen
mass of rock and ice on an unknown course, and get caught in the gravity of a
planet or the sun and burn out or follow a predictable path. In either case “the
universe will carry on.”

The trick is to face our ghosts, confront them, engage with
them, and then to move on, like the comets that follow a path rather than break
up and collide with plants and stars. We all have our ghosts; it is how we deal
with them. “There will be tests, they tell her. Physical, psychological,
survival. There is something appealing in that. She would like to be told that
she can survive.”

Monday, January 2, 2017

Gutenberg’s Apprentice
by Alix Christie is historical fiction and outlines the beginnings of the printing
press and the power of the free press. Johan Gutenberg liberated mankind with
the most important invention in our history, moveable type, the printing press
that would bring and share the knowledge of the world with mankind. It wrested
knowledge from the tyrannical church that dispensed its version of truth as it
saw fit to control the people. The printing press created a middle class; it
created a freedom to people not previously known. It provided a way for man to
share information in mass quantities and cheaply. The first book Gutenberg
printed was the Bible. Heretofore the
people were told the contents of the Bible
by the church. They didn’t have the primary source in their hands; they
received it in secondary and tertiary methods, not the same as having the
primary source in hand. Gutenberg took that primary source and distributed it
to the people, thus taking the power away from Rome and giving it to the
people. Some believe that this may have led to the Reformation. The printing
press changed the balance of power in the world forever. And now we have a new
president who is behaving like those tyrants who preceded the printing press.

I had grown up hearing the phrase, “Power to he who owned
the press.” That was the cry of every printer in young America especially
Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin. Without them and other brave pamphleteers,
America might not be. Within a short time newspapers were prolific in every
city and were the way in which the masses learned about their society. “The
power of the press” was a major force in the development of CyberEnglish since
every student had a webpage and was like those early pamphleteers.

I find it ironic in a new age of information dispersal, in
an educated country, we have whittled down the former avalanche of information
into a mere 140 characters, we call Twitter, the bane of the intelligent and
intellectual world. Gutenberg would be ashamed of us as he sees the next leader
of America take us back to the dark days of illiteracy that greeted Peter
Schoeffer when he returned home to begin his adventure with Gutenberg as the printing
press was invented and provided for the advancement of mankind and education.

Twitter is undoing all of that and we have already seen the
results of the dumbing down of America. We now have a president who wants to
consolidate power, runs from the press, limits his communication to 140 characters,
and has put us back into the dark ages, a dreaded period we read about and may
find ourselves living in. Are we seeing a renewed period we will call our
Inquisition in America with this new president? The newest craze is fake news. With
the Internet we have an active readership where reader and writer are
interacting like no other media before. It is another brave new world, one in
which we all have to learn, to learn to be more vigilant and more skeptical
until we have done our own research. Trusting certain news without verifying is
as bad if not worse than not knowing. Being a citizen now takes on more work
and some just don’t seem up to it or want to be responsible. For some it is
just fun and/or moneymaking as we have discovered especially in the new world
of fake news. Power to he who owns the press takes on a whole new meaning
today.

Tyrannical leaders and their minions have always castigated
the press, we merely need to review our history books, before they are burned.
The press is merely the messenger, so don’t kill the messenger; sound out the
message, research the message, then you will know the truth, if you dare face
it. Tyranny prospers in a sea of ignorance and America has become that sea of
ignorance and denial for our new president.

The ironic twist in this novel is that the father, Johann
Fust, Gutenberg’s main and only backer, is trying to convince the son about the
future of printing. The son has just become an important scribe in the
university of Paris when his father calls him home to Mainz, Germany, to meet a
man, Gutenberg. Peter is skeptical about this new invention and its seemingly
inferior copy to a well-crafted manuscript. “Not yet. His father’s nostrils
flared. “Not yet – but give it time. You can’t imagine it, perhaps, but I can.
Books everywhere, and costing less than manuscripts – in quantities that simply
stun the mind. Imagine how the world would look if anyone could buy one!” It is
the son who argues for the past and the father for the future. Today, it is the
youth who go from computer app to computer app and through constant upgrades
while the elders are happy with flip phones and books. Our youth are leading us
backwards in intellectual curiosity and development with the use of Twitter. We
need more than 140 characters. And we need the truth, facts borne out, and more
heady research that Twitter forgets about and allows the users to ignore like
the story of the Emperors New Clothes.

In the beginning God
created heaven and earth. We all know how it begins, but how the first Bible by Gutenberg was begun is an
interesting story that revolves around the usual intrigue, politics, and backstabbing
associated with the church in the 1450’s. The beginning of printing the Bible came about because they couldn’t
get the agreed upon missives from the archbishop. They had all the supplies and
nothing to print. Then they came upon the Bible,
because it was the word of God and couldn’t be changed by man. Through trial
and error they stumbled through the first pages and learned about printing by
doing. I learned printing by doing it in college. I made books. I wrote the
poetry, chose the paper, the ink, the type, and printed the pages on a hand
press. I chose the method of binding the book and did that. I made five books
of poetry and sold three of them. That was the beginning for me and for
CyberEnglish. I relished the power I had just acquired. While reading the
exploits of Gutenberg and his cohorts, I share in their joy, their failures,
and their successes. I feel a kinship with them as they labored over their
press.

All of the work had to be done in secrecy. Collecting that
amount of hide, paper, ink, metals for the type used strategies common to
armies. In addition to this stealth, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern
Rome fell to Muslim armies and Pope Nicholas V waged a Crusade that threatened
the taking of men and other valuable resources. The whole undertaking of
printing the Bible was tension filled
and anxiety ridden. But press on the printers did. When they finally set out to
the Frankfurt fair, four years after they started the Bible, to sell the Bible
they were apprehensive. But in short order all books were sold and the chains
of man had been taken off and he was freed by the invention of Johann
Gutenberg.

Today we take for granted the printed word. We have seen how
it has been used to manipulate man, to educate man, to enrich man; and yet
today the technology has gone in another direction and we have to be sure to always
consider the source of what we read. The Bible
was the word of God and by using it that was Gutenberg’s genius for introducing
the printing press. Just because it is written doesn’t mean it’s fact. Trust
but verify.

EST

About Me

I retired in Feb 2012 after teaching English since 1974 in private and public schools. I'm a father of three. I have twin granddaughters and a grandson. I have two younger sisters. I live in Woodstock, GA and I travel in a Scamp.
ted.nellen@gmail.com